Unconscious Elitism

I was glancing at a feature on BBC Capital earlier today, called Idiosyncrasies of the Brits at work. The article offers a foreign perspective on the culture of the British workplace, in particular the views of people who have come to work in the UK from abroad.

The aspect of the article that started to irk me was that the writer, Mark Johanson, referred to the people he had interviewed as ‘expats’ (short for ‘expatriates’, obviously enough) throughout. Not a problem in itself, but my concern is that ‘expats’ is definitely not the term the BBC would use if it were a news article about people coming into the country from an impoverished background elsewhere, and accepting absolutely any work that came their way, no matter how badly-paid.

There has been much unhappiness recently about the media’s persistent use of the word ‘migrants’ in relation to…